Kate Just, ‘Feminist Fan’

Kate Just is an American-born Australian visual artist. Since 2002, Just has created an expansive body of visual art work in a diversity of media including knitting, resin, clay, collage and photo-media. Just’s works feature figures, large text sculptures, knitted pictures, abstracted forms and collections of knitted skins, tools and armours. A focal point in her practice is the development of feminist representations of the body and womanhood that embrace subjective, embodied and multifarious perspectives. The use of knitting across works casts craft as a highly engaging sculptural medium, a poetic or political tool. Recently, Just has produced a series of socially engaged projects and public works about urban community, female representation and violence against women.

Kate Just was born in Connecticut, USA in 1974, and migrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1996. Just holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Sculpture) from Monash University, a Master of Arts from RMIT and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts where she has been a Lecturer in Art since 2005. Just has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across Australia including atDaine Singer, Craft Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, West Space, Conical, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Art Fair, Silvershot, Contemporary Art Space of Tasmania, Chalk Horse Gallery, Nellie Castan Gallery, First Draft, MOP, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Internationally, Just has exhibited her work at Nanjing University, Auckland Art Fair, AC Institute New York, and the Factory at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. In 2015-16, Just will exhibit her work internationally at Gallery Titanik in Turku, Finland and Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, Japan.

Just has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes. She has been awarded funding for new work by the City of Melbourne, Arts Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts. For her studio led PhD project, Just was the 2014 recipient of the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal. Just was the winner of the 2007 Siemens Travel Award, the 2012 British Council Realise Your Dream Award, the 2013 Rupert Bunny Visual Arts Fellowship and the 2015 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award. She has undertaken local residencies at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Lake Macquarie Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Australian Tapestry Workshop and held international residencies at Krems (AIR) and the Australia Council Studio Barcelona. Just’s work is held in collections including The National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Ergas Collection, City of Port Phillip, Ararat Regional Art Gallery and Proclaim Management Collection. Kate Just is represented by Daine Singer.

Feminist Fan is an ongoing body of new work Just began in early 2015. Involving the production of up to forty hand knitted ‘paintings’,Feminist Fan will form an irreverent (and reverent), DIY, selected pictorial archive of global feminist artists and activists performing with their bodies in transgressive and socially transformative ways. Just’s knitted portraits are haptic, tactile, stitched homages to brave, funny, radical forms of female representation across continents and time periods. Created in the artist’s signature medium of wool and bearing tiny flaws, snags and a sense of the homemade and domestic, the knitted portraits reflect on the sustained influence of feminism globally and the importance of feminist art and thinking to Just’s own practice. In the first year of development, Just has knitted Carolee Schneemann, Lynda Benglis, Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman and Hannah Wilke as well as activists and girl groups such as Pussy Riot (Russia), Femen (Ukraine), The Feminist Five (China) and Bosozoku Cosplay Girls.

Just will continue developing the series in local and international contexts including artist residencies over the next year at Billilla Mansion in Brighton, Victoria, Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo and others to be confirmed.